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Family Discord Over Spoils From the Punk Shrine CBGB

CBGB club scenes from 1977: from left, Joey Ramone; Hilly Kristal, who founded CBGB; and Deborah Harry of Blondie.Credit
Photographs by Godlis

At the opening party for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC on Tuesday night, fans and celebrities rubbed elbows while ogling an exhibition of artifacts from CBGB, the landmark Bowery club that closed in 2006.

Studying the club’s tattered awning, cash register and flier-covered phone booth, Steven Van Zandt of the E Street Band and Handsome Dick Manitoba of the Dictators, a band that was one of CBGB’s 1970s mainstays, nodded in approval. “O.K., we can go now,” Mr. Manitoba said.

But just as CBGB is getting its due alongside John Lennon’s piano and Jimi Hendrix’s guitar, its ownership and legacy are being challenged by a lawsuit that has riven the family of its proprietor, Hilly Kristal, who died last year. Like the battle over the Brooke Astor estate — minus $100 million or so, but still worth plenty, thanks to the popularity of CBGB T-shirts — the case is filled with accusations of fraud and deception, and it adds a bitter coda to the story of a beloved New York institution.

In the suit, filed last year in Surrogate’s Court in Manhattan but amended in a hearing last week, Mr. Kristal’s 83-year-old former wife, Karen, says she is the rightful owner of the business, and that Mr. Kristal and their daughter, Lisa Kristal Burgman, 53 — who inherited the bulk of her father’s estate of more than $3 million — systematically deceived her by hiding money from the sale of merchandise.

The elder Ms. Kristal received nothing in the will, and the couple’s son, Dana, 49, who sides with his mother against his sister, will receive a maximum of $100,000, depending on taxes and other expenses of the estate, his lawyer said.

At the center of the case is an agreement the Kristals made before they opened CBGB in 1973. Although they had already divorced, Ms. Kristal became the sole owner of the company that operated the club because Mr. Kristal had declared bankruptcy in a previous business. She held various jobs there, and says she designed and painted the logo.

“I started CBGB,” Ms. Kristal said in an interview at her lawyer’s office in Midtown Manhattan. “I put up the money, spent my time in there. And then my daughter says that they get it all. And that’s a lie.”

Although Mr. Kristal was the public face of the club and essentially ran the business, Ms. Kristal was a fixture there for decades. She tended bar, cleaned up, checked IDs at the door and often acted as a disciplinarian, drawing a weekly salary of $100.

“We were all scared of her,” said Danny Fields, a former manager of the Ramones. “She was like a witch. She was always carrying a broom.”

Photo

Karen Kristal is fighting for a share of the estate left by her former husband, Hilly Kristal.Credit
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Lisa Kristal Burgman declined to comment for this article, but in a statement lawyers for the estate called her mother’s claims “specious,” adding, “CBGB was, and is, synonymous with Hilly Kristal.”

In court papers the estate says that Ms. Kristal voluntarily signed over ownership to her former husband in January 2005, just as CBGB was beginning to have troubles with its landlord over unpaid rent, which ultimately led to the club’s closing.

Ms. Kristal said that she had no memory of signing this document, which is also signed by Mr. Kristal, but not by any lawyers or witnesses.

Her lawyers argue that even if Ms. Kristal did sign the document, she had been manipulated by her daughter and former husband. According to the suit, Mr. Kristal had been “crying poverty” to Ms. Kristal for years, and hid from her his establishment of CBGB Fashions, a company that handled merchandise. In March 2005 he told The New York Times that CBGB Fashions grossed about $2 million a year.

Complicating matters, shortly before he died of cancer Mr. Kristal agreed to sell CBGB’s assets and trademarks for a total of $3.5 million. Their buyer, CBGB Holdings LLC, which has declined to comment, sells merchandise out of a storage space in Brooklyn, and lent much of the CBGB collection to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Last week’s hearing added CBGB Holdings to the case as a third party.

When asked about the case, Michael S. Elkin, an intellectual-property lawyer in New York at Winston & Strawn, who is not involved in the lawsuit, said it would be up to Ms. Kristal to prove that she had been deceived and that the documents cited by the estate are invalid.

“A lot of this will turn on whether there is any corroborating documentary evidence,” Mr. Elkin said, “and whether or not this 83-year-old woman can withstand a fierce cross-examination, because it’s going to come at her like a bat out of hell.”

Longtime members of the CBGB circle shook their heads at the ugliness of the dispute, but said that whatever happens, CBGB’s symbolic place as the birthplace of punk rock would be untainted.

“It’s sad, but it seems kind of inevitable,” Arturo Vega, the Ramones’ longtime artistic director, said of the suit. “But it shouldn’t reflect what this place was about, not at all. CBGB was a beacon of freedom for young people, something to believe in.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Family Discord Over Spoils From the Punk Shrine CBGB. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe